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For Immediate Release

The 5 important Lessons Not Learnt from Deepwater Horizon

WASHINGTON - The second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster is upon us - and looking at the lessons the oil industry got from it, you’d think it never happened. Here are the most important points governments and oil companies didn’t learn:

1) Apparently the oil industry still knows best. Remember all the congressional hearings, recommendations, pledges to do better in the future that immediately followed Deepwater Horizon? It all amounted to essentially nothing. The US Congress has not adopted a single piece of legislation (not one!) to put stricter controls over oil companies to limit the ever-increasing risks they are taking to drill for more oil. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, governments still seem to think that the oil industry knows best and can police itself.

3) It takes a lot of capacity to clean up an oil spill. Over 6,000 vessels and tens of thousands of people were needed to respond to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Shell is planning to drill in Alaska this summer and has named just nine ships in their oil spill response plan for the Chukchi Sea. Alaska is far more remote than the Gulf, less populated, and the US Coast Guard admitted that there was “no way we could deploy several thousand people as we did in the Deepwater Horizon.”

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Something is Happening. People are Drawing Lines.
And We’ve Got It Covered.

5) We need to quit oil. It’s almost a tick-box: after every oil disaster in history, there have been inevitable promises, wide op-eds in newspapers, and consensus that the world can’t stay addicted to oil (other tick-boxes include: saying that everyone will be justly compensated, that nothing like this will happen again because security norms will be reinforced, and finding someone else to blame). Yet, nothing happens. We have technology today to reduce our oil consumption, we know how to spark an energy revolution, but we are held back by those who profit from dirty energy.

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Further

Because so much winning, another good ole bigot - with an actual bully pulpit - has crawled out of his cave to call for the Ku Klux Klan "to night ride again" and hang Democrats, "Republican Democrats" and "socialist-communists" with "hemp ropes to clean out D.C." The newspaper of one Goodloe Sutton has evidently long been "a cesspool of indefensible bilge." Hence, when asked about the propriety of his call, this defense of the Klan: "Well, they didn't kill but a few people." Thanks Trump.

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